Jonas Mekas, Shiver of Memory

Peter Delpeut

Description

• National print and broadcast campaign

• Marketing to the Jewish Book Council and Jewish Book Groups

• Author tour in Southern California and New York at panel discussions, TBD

• Potential for high-level endorsements from Jewish and/or independent filmmakers and screenwriters, alongside film professors at top-ranking film schools

• DRCs available as well as ARCs upon request

• Art and cultural criticism: A book about art, its ability to witness, and memory: analyzes 'the unspoken' in Jonas Mekas films, poetry, and excerpts of diaries. Impassioned, visual writing makes for quick and compelling reading. Makes readers think about their own relationships to past genocides, civil wars, colonization, and occupations.
  
• Important Jewish scholarship highlighted: Brings a conflict to light between witnesses of trauma and dispassionate historians. Mekas's antagonist in a controversy at the NYRB is historian Michael Casper, a well-respected author and scholar of Jewish history, specializing in interwar Lithuania, who has been an USHMM Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and received his doctorate from UCLA. Mekas never mentions the Holocaust in Lithuania. Casper asks, why?
• Mekas is the 'Godfather of American avant-garde cinema’: extremely influential, founded the New York Anthology Archives, wrote his Movie Journal column in the Village Voice for decades. Collected his columns and diaries in popular books. Numerous international awards bestowed during his lifetime (1922–2019) and his circle included such celebrities as Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Susan Sontag, Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackie Kennedy.
• Lithuania during the Holocaust: Reveals little-known facts about one of the most brutal areas of activity for the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi assassination squads), who often enlisted civilians in their crimes. The book presents the life of an exile and former displaced-person from war-torn Europe. Readers learn specific circumstances about the civilians in the Soviet-occupied Baltic States, who lived through WWII and the Holocaust, as well as facts about the 95% of Lithuanian Jewish residents who were killed.
• Cancel culture and its limitations: Several hinge-points relating to today’s most toxic and polarizing topics, all taking place at the venerable New York Review of Books in 2018 under the former leadership of Ian Buruma, who was fired for taking sides in the #MeToo movement and publishing an accused sexual assault perpetrator’s self-defense. Shows the impossibility of neutral ground but also, in the Mekas case, people’s rush to judgment.
• Author is established film director: Delpeut was deputy-director of the Netherlands Filmmuseum (now Eye) for 7 years and is a well-respected Dutch author of novels and essays. His prior books have explored art, film, witnessing, the nature of truth, and the pain of losing loved ones. 
• Striking book design: spot gloss and edge printing. Page number design has a flip-book element. Designed by a young Lithuanian typographer.

memories
Michael Casper
Mekas revisited
charisma
diary
oral history
magazine
the forest of Astravas
trauma
trust
documentary
settle the scores
Bibliography
Acknowledgments

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• Holocauste
• Film
• ART
• Fluxus
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Architect
• Artist
• Video
• World War II
• Holocaust denial
• List of photographers
• NYRB
• The Holocaust
• The Holocaust in Lithuania
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Architects
• HISTORY
• Holocaust
• Artists
• Essays
• Photographers

Informations

• Publié par: DoppelHouse Press
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781954600041
• Langue: English

Extrait

Jonas Mekas Shiver of Memory
Peter Delpeut
Jonas Mekas, Shiver of Memory © 2022 by Peter Delpeut
Het vergeten kwaad © 2021 by Peter Delpeut Originally published by Uitgeverij Atlas Contact, Amsterdam
Book design: Tauras Stalnionis
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Delpeut, Peter, author.
Title: Jonas Mekas , shiver of memory / by Peter Delpeut.
Description: Includes bibliographical references. | Los Angeles, CA: DoppelHouse Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN: 2021952736 | ISBN: 978-1-954600-03-4 (paperback) | 978-1-954600-04-1 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH Mekas, Jonas, 1922-2019. | Motion pictures--Production and direction--Biography. | Lithuanian American artists--United States. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Lithuania. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers | ART / Individual Artists / Essays | ART / Film & Video | HISTORY / Holocaust
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.M44 D45 2022 | DDC 791.43/015--dc23

DoppelHouse Press
Los Angeles
DoppelHouse.com
for Sarah & Chris
veltui
einu
einu
ir
šen,
ir
ten –
Aimlessly
pacing,
going
this
way
and
that,
vis
atgal
sugrįžtu,
ir
viskas,
kas
viduj
plyšta
ir
išeiti
veržias,
veržias,
just
to keep
coming
back,
while
everything
inside,
breaking
and
raging
raging
to escape,
Palieka
neat–
verta,
neišsakyta.
stays
locked
up,
un
–told.
from: “Miške / In the Woods,” Jonas Mekas, Words Apart and others: poems 1967 & 1998 translated from Lithuanian by Vyt Bakaitis.
memories
First a memory (in a memory). It was raining and the streets of Vicenza were deserted. The Sunday flaneurs were hiding in the coffee houses and we fled into the Palazzo Chiericati, one of Palladio’s architectural masterpieces that are the pride of the city. The interior turned out to be disappointingly smoothed with white museum walls, but centuries of Italian painting quickly made us forget about it. We were the only visitors and perhaps it was the ascetic silence that held me for a long time in a narrow room, almost a corridor, where a row of “Madonna and Child” were presented, like the ones that were delivered on the assembly line in Italy around 1500. Mary holding the Savior as a still fragile, (half) naked baby on her lap.
I kept coming back to the small paintings by Bartolomeo Montagna, who I didn’t know, but of whom I now know that he worked in Giovanni Bellini’s studio. The latter perhaps explains the introverted softness in the eyes of the Madonnas, although it was not their gaze that bound me to them. It is only natural to describe the way Mary holds her baby as affectionate, but I saw something else in it: anxiety. For me, her grip was that of a worried mother who wants to protect her child from the dangers that lie ahead. I felt the hand of my own mother, sickly worried: Not too close to the stairwell! Careful crossing! Beware! Attention! She pulled her children tight against her, we threatened to disappear into her skirts, her hand pressed on our chests: loving, no doubt, but also filled with an uncontrollable fear.
There was an explanation for this pathological anxiety, a family story that was often repeated. Her sister, seven years old, had run off the yard of her parents’ home carefree and was killed by a cyclist. The memory of this had nested in my mother, just as a body remembers a rotten mussel. Every unexpected movement of her children evoked the image of her running sister — and her lifeless body on the chilly paving stones. She could still tell it sixty, seventy years later with her voice squeezed shut. It was an indestructible emotion, which after all these years still sounded raw. It was her way to clarify the anxiety her children despised: who else but she knew what could happen to us if she didn’t protect us?
Why did these Madonnas bring that memory to me right now? My mother passed away many years ago, and I would like to believe that I have left the anguished care for her children behind me. It was not so much the image of my mother that forced itself on me, but a photo from our family album. Together we are waiting along the side of the street for a parade to pass our house. She holds me pressed against her, half bent over because I am still a toddler, and she has put her hand on my chest. The hands of Mary of Montagna and the hand of my mother in the little black and white picture were glued tightly together. Two images — centuries apart — blended into one memory. I was surprised that it could interfere so easily in a carefree museum visit.
My beloved came to see where I was. No more than a glance of understanding, because she knows my penchant for loitering. Look at the hands, I said. When we get home I have to show you a picture.
Back in the Netherlands I wrote an email to my younger sister who keeps the family albums. I described the photo to her and asked her to send it to me. Oh, of course, she mailed me back, I know that picture very well. Only it’s not you in it, it’s me. The digital image she sent me made any argument superfluous.
It’s a well-known fact that we can make other people’s memories our own. Not that we always realize that. I was shocked when the picture appeared on my screen, stunned by my wrongful appropriation. My sister didn’t feel robbed at all. She pointed out to me that I had spoken about this photo at my mother’s funeral, so it had to mean a lot to us. When she wrote that, I remembered that at the end of that ceremony many visitors had come to me to confirm that I had identified something in that photo that summed up my mother’s character sharply. Through my observation it had become an iconic image, not so much different from how painters thought they should depict Mary’s motherly love. Iconic images are of everyone, which is their strength. I had made it into a picture for everybody.
At the same time, in the spirit of that moment, in front of family and friends, the photograph had crept into my emotional household as a memory that was exclusively mine: this was my mother, as she had been to me . No matter how factually and traceably that photo was pointing to my sister, it had become me in that photo. It was a trace of my existence, anchored as my memory — but not mine.
With my sister’s photograph, I had “augmented” my own memories. It helped me understand my relationship with my mother. It’s a helpful memory. I won’t forget it, because in its compactness — exemplary yet private — it is a clear scene in the story I want to remember of my mother and me.
Not all memories have that characteristic. There are also memories that we forget, until someone points them out to us — and an uncomfortable situation arises: why did the other person remember something I forgot? Not a bit of forgetting, but in a way that makes it seem as if it didn’t happen.
Immediately after the film premiere of a filmmaker friend, a woman enthusiastically addressed me. We apparently had collaborated on organizing an exhibition with works of Sergei Parajanov in the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam — I summarize it now, because for the woman the memory was so clear that she immediately recounted details with me without explaining the context. She expected the same clarity from me, but my image remained empty, even during the rest of the reception. Although I regularly searched for the woman’s face, my memory refused to cooperate. I felt guilty that I had not been able to answer her enthusiasm. If I had earned a place in the story of her memory, why then had my memory rejected it so rudely?
Now that I write this down, it seems strange to me, because the completely white spot is no longer as empty as it was when I met her. With a slight discomfort I tried to fill the empty sheet during the return journey on the train with at least a few quick-sketched contours. It wasn’t difficult to demarcate place and time (I only worked for the Filmmuseum for seven years, although that was more than twenty years ago), and especially by remembering the narrow exhibition space of that time (just like the corridor with Madonna’s in Vicenza) I suddenly saw little pictures in front of me, a long row against a white wall, and I vaguely remembered the appearance of two exotic guests (Armenian? Georgian? a man and a woman?) who were accompanied by an interpreter: she had to be the woman who had spoken to me, but in my memory she was still without a face, even though there was the face of the reception.
Deduction has evoked images, but they are indeterminate, and moreover they are colored, because through the word Armenia and Parajanov’s films I see someone in front of me with deer eyes, almondshaped as they appear in the women in his films and in the portraits painted by the Armenian painter Niko Pirosmani, which I once wrote about. Is that why they appear so easily in my mind’s eye? I filled in the color plate of my memory myself, as I do now, because as I write this down, a table in the museum restaurant returns (where we dined with all our guests of course, how special is that?), and even sharper and more intriguing a little book about Parajanov in Cyrillic script, in which pale, red colored photos as in many Soviet publications of those years, a gift — I’ve walked to my bookcase now and actually, I find the book, although it’s not a book: it’s a plastic folder with eighteen framed slides of paintings/collages by the filmmaker, turned into magenta, the hue of the passage of time in color photography. A gift that still moves me and which I now look at with some shame: how could I have forgotten this unique little folder?
I can only think of one answer to it. There is a story about Parajanov that is much more familiar. In my memory it has claimed exactly the space I want to make free for him. Once I interviewed him in his room in the Hilton Hotel in Rotterdam, together with my good friend Mart Dominicus. He had left the Soviet Union for the first time,